A typical business communication system includes an enterprise switch which directs calls from one or more incoming trunks to various user terminals. The user terminals may include, for example, wired desksets, wireless desksets, wireless mobile telephones and advanced terminals such as computers or video telephones. A shared communication facility within such a system is generally represented in both the switch and the corresponding terminals as a "Call Appearance" (CA). When a CA to a shared facility is presented on multiple user terminals, and multiple users are allowed to access this facility, the CA is known as a "bridged appearance." In existing systems, such bridged appearances can generally only be defined at system administration time, for example, during an initial set-up and configuration of the system or during a subsequent system-level reconfiguration. As a result, conventional bridged appearances remain static until the system is re-administered. This conventional static architecture is generally considered best suited for wired terminals, where the operational expectation is that the user associated with a given terminal will be at his or her desk, and will be the primary or exclusive user of that terminal.
However, in systems which support wireless terminals and other more advanced equipment, users will typically have more than one terminal available to them, and may also be allowed to use the advanced equipment on a demand basis. For example, a given set of users may each have a wired deskset, a simple mobile telephone, and access on a random demand basis to an advanced shared resource such as a video telephone. Unfortunately, the above-noted conventional static bridging techniques are unable to create a dynamic bridged appearance that exists on, for example, both the mobile telephone of a given user and an advanced shared resource which happens to be located in proximity to the mobile telephone at a particular time. The conventional techniques therefore generally do not provide the user with an option of answering an incoming call directed to the mobile telephone at a co-located advanced terminal, unless the advanced terminal has been bridged with the mobile telephone during system administration. As a result, the user will often be unable to access the more sophisticated features of a nearby advanced terminal for accepting calls directed to the mobile, or placing calls as a known originator.